Local Color

1) Two people in this county were confirmed positive for Kung Flu today. Didn’t hear if they were the ones who came in our doors last week, or from somewhere else. Can’t decide which answer would be worse.

2) Did a tour of the local boutiques.

WallyWorld Megastore:

Bottled water: completely effing stripped to the bare floor.
Hand sanitizer: All gone. Dust bunnies on the empty shelves.
Masks: You missed that boat 2 weeks ago, and they’re never coming back.
MH freeze-drieds in the sporting goods aisle: bare wall.
Antiseptic wipes: Gone.
Nitrile gloves: a couple of boxes left.
Canned tuna: maybe 10 cans left, total.
Dinty Moore beef stew: ditto.
TP: Took a serious ass-raping, but some left. Bigger packs gone, smaller quantities still available.
Bleach: hammered, but a few bottles still available.
Isopropyl alcohol and Hydrogen peroxide: single digits of each left.
Curiously, the beer aisle and the ammo cabinets were still full; priorities, I guess. Also, even though the water was gone, there were tons of powdered Gatorade, lemonade, Kool-Aid, etc. For those who haven’t done it, drinking plain water day after day after day gets damned old, fast.

Hand sanitizer was totally gone from Target, Home Depot, Office Depot, and three large-chain drug stores. If Purrell was dynamite, you couldn’t find enough in the entire county to blow your nose. And as noted previously, masks of any variety are unobtanium.

HD had huge displays of disinfecting wipes, gloves, and bleach by the entrance.

Office Depot had a pallet of bottled water just sitting there. Costco and Target had none.

Batteries of all sizes plentiful most places. Ditto 1# propane cans.

Nobody appeared to be panic-buying at Costco, and things were average busy at dinnertime.

And from morning to evening, not a single clerk at any store had any idea that Italy has basically tapped out of Europe today. I had a hospital in-service during the day, and when I told the ER docs on duty, they about freaked out at the news, knowing that the shitball is just gaining momentum.

Anybody still betting on this being a nothingburger?
Just curious.